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Straight From the Art

From Fort Worth’s Kimbell to Houston’s Menil, Texas’s museums are home to a diverse and exquisite collection of masterpieces. To devise a list of our ten greatest works on view, we asked more than sixty curators, gallery owners, critics, and other insiders for their favorites. So come along on the ultimate art tour of Texas.

The boom is on in Texas—and for once we’re not talking oil. The state is in the middle of an all-out arts explosion that is boosting our cultural capital and reinvigorating our civic life. Consider the once-in-a-lifetime blockbuster exhibitions we’ve been landing: the 2008 J. M. W. Turner retrospective at the Dallas Museum of Art, for example, and this month’s Caravaggio exhibit at Fort Worth’s Kimbell Art Museum (the only showing in the country). Or think of the buzz around starchitect-led projects like Rem Koolhaas’s 2009 Wyly Theatre, in the Dallas Arts District, and Renzo Piano’s impending 2013 addition to the Kimbell. Then there’s the recent raft of major acquisitions—a 2005 gift to the DMA from three collector couples of works worth $300 million is still causing ripples—and lauded curatorial hires, from Peter Doroshenko at the Dallas Contemporary to Thomas Kellein at Marfa’s Chinati Foundation. Not to mention, of course, the artists, both homegrown (Dario